The Doric Quartet Returns, Part 1: Haydn & Mendelssohn

At a live radio broadcast in Paris

 PLEASE NOTE, DUE TO THE WEATHER FORECAST, THIS CONCERT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED FOR THURSDAY NIGHT! 

Who: The Doric Quartet
What: playing Haydn, Mendelssohn and Bartók
When: 8pm Thursday, February 21st (with a pre-concert talk by Dick Strawser at 7:15)
Where: at Temple Ohev Sholom, at 2345 N. Front Street in uptown Harrisburg (between Seneca and Emerald Streets)
Tickets can be purchased online through our website here or here; by calling 717-221-9599; or by emailing info@marketsquareconcerts.org. Tickets are also available at the door before the concert. There are also $5 tickets for college/university students available at the door and school-age (K-12) students are free.
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The Doric Quartet, calling London home, is on another American tour and so, a month before the Spring Equinox, they are returning to Harrisburg once again, this time with a program covering three centuries of great string quartet repertoire: Franz Josef Haydn from 1781, Felix Mendelssohn from 1837, and Bela Bartók from 1934.

It will give me an opportunity to talk about the history of the string quartet at the Pre-Concert Talk (starting at 7:15) and how a classicist, a romanticist and a modernist (or who was at least a modernist when he composed it) treated the string quartet as a form and as a group of four stringed instruments.

In these two posts – this one is about Haydn & Mendelssohn; the next one, which you can read here, about Bartók – you can hear each quartet in its entirety with some background information about each one, but let's begin with some examples of the Doric Quartet playing Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Bartók – just not the pieces they'll be playing here (I have other recordings for those).

First, some Haydn. Let's just say, while he's called “The Father of the Symphony,” he's also known as “The Father of the String Quartet” (needless to say, Haydn got around) if anyone can be credited with inventing a musical form. Or is that genre...? Or perhaps, in this case, also a medium... Anyway, here's the Doric playing the opening movement of one of Haydn's earlier quartets – No. 6 from the set, Op. 20 (known as “The Sun” Quartets), recorded in Wigmore Hall, one of the great halls not only in London but in the world.


While the concert order is Haydn, Bartók / Mendelssohn, I'm going to follow them chronologically so you can hear the stylistic and historical development between each composer's approach as well as the performers' approach to their music.

So here's the 19th Century romanticist, Felix Mendelssohn, and the intensely gorgeous slow movement from the Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 44 No. 3, a companion piece to the one they'll be performing here:


Now, Bartók will sound like a whole different world, compared to the more familiar styles of Haydn and Mendelssohn and everybody else who's part of the traditional pantheon of the standard repertoire before 1900. And if you think of the Doric as “elegant performers” with their “classy classicism” (I'm sorry, I have no idea where that came from), here's the last movement of Bartók's 4th String Quartet from 1928.


(Every time I hear this quartet, I am reminded of a time years ago, listening to a recording of this with a bunch of my colleagues, when a violinist said, “now, that is down-home music!” We all laughed, of course, because one could hardly imagine Bartók the country-western entertainer until my violinist-friend said he grew up in a family of Hungarian immigrants!)

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Haydn in London, 1791

Haydn wrote about 70 string quartets, give or take – of the original 86, some are only attributed to Haydn, others have been discovered not to be by him at all, even though one of them includes the once-ubiquitous chestnut, “Haydn's Serenade” – but like his 104 symphonies, most of the early quartets are overshadowed by the late ones. The Op. 20 set – like most of his quartets, published as a group of six different works – appeared in 1772 when Haydn was already 40 years old and well known as a composer. The first “great” works in the quartet repertoire, they became famous enough to earn him that nickname of “The Father of the String Quartet,” establishing the pattern for the string quartet as a medium for the next two centuries.

Nine years later, his next set of quartets, his Op. 33, were composed in a “new and particular manner,” he wrote to his publisher. If they had no more claim to fame, these were the ones that inspired Mozart to go and do likewise. While it's assumed Haydn's Op. 20 led Mozart to emulate them in his own first quartets, it was the Op. 33 set that triggered the six “Haydn Quartets” by Mozart – or to be less confusing, Mozart's “Six Quartets Dedicated to Haydn” – which are a solid part of the Quartet Repertoire today.

The Op. 33 Quartets are sometimes collectively known as the “Russian Quartets” though they're even less Russian than the three Beethoven would later write for the Russian Ambassador in Vienna, Count Razumovsky (which at least included a Russian theme in two of them). Premiered on Christmas Day of 1781, Haydn's were dedicated to the then Grand Duke Paul of Russia, Empress Catherine the Great's son and heir who would later become, briefly, the tsar between 1796 and 1801 when he would be assassinated in a palace coup.

Haydn, Mozart & friends playing quartets

Mozart had just arrived in Vienna and would no doubt have known these new quartets, perhaps even played them when he got together in 1784 with some friends to play quartets: Mozart, then 28 and no longer the New Kid on the Block, played the viola and Haydn, now 52, was one of the violinists. The other two were better known both as composers and performers in their day, but today Dittersdorf and Vanhal are otherwise largely forgotten.

Here's the Quartet Berlin-Tokyo performing the Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 33 No. 4 of Franz Josef Haydn, recorded at the Banff competition in 2016:


The typical structural plan for the “Classical Quartet” (and, for that matter, the typical symphony) was four movements: the first movement, usually the major movement of the entire work, would be in Sonata Form, followed by the slow movement for contrast. A brief minuet in a moderate tempo (stately, a courtly dance) preceded the final movement, often a fast, light-hearted conclusion in Rondo form, the requisite happy ending (this was, after all, meant to be entertainment).

In this particular quartet, Haydn writes a first movement less adventuresome than those of its companions and though he places the minuet in second place – and calls it a scherzo which to us implies a faster and less courtly dance-style (yet it sounds to us like your typical minuet) – the slow movement, now in third, is the emotional heart of the piece with its luxurious violin melody and simple textures. The lively finale, whimsical and full of quirky turns, sudden stops, and a bit of a gypsy dance whirling past at one point, becomes almost pure slapstick compared to what serious audiences expected (they had not yet learned with “Papa Haydn” you should expect the unexpected). Critics of the day who complained Haydn was “debasing the art with comic foolery” must have been exasperated by the ending: pizzicato, plucking the string rather than playing it with the bow, was something of a special effect and rarely heard, so when he gives you one last go-round of the tune played pizzicato, those same critics were no doubt rolling their eyes. Even today, the usual effect is to hear the audience's good-natured laugh.

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Felix Mendelssohn began his career as a child prodigy, writing a dozen small symphonies when he was 12 and 13, and anyone who hears two of his most famous works – the Octet for Strings and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night's Dream” – can be forgiven if they think these are the works of a mature genius when actually he was 16 and 17 when he wrote them!

The Mendelssohns' Honeymoon Carriage

By the time he composed the first of his three quartets published as Op. 44, Mendelssohn was now all of 28 – and on his honeymoon! He and his wife Cecile were married in March of 1837 (and no, they didn't play Mendelssohn's “Wedding March” because he didn't write it until five years later), then followed that with a leisurely trip through the Rhineland and the Black Forest, Cecile's health being frail. (The drawing, above, was made by Felix for their wedding diary.) On June 11th, she writes in this diary how she'd been unwell lately and was lying around all day on the bed or the couch. “He is working steadily as always. What I am doing is so unimportant, I cannot remember...” On June 18th, Mendelssohn completed his E Minor String Quartet which was premiered when they returned home in October from London. The following year, he would write two more quartets which became No. 1 and No. 3 of the set, Op. 44.

Here's the Verona Quartet who'd performed in May of 2017 with Market Square Concerts, recorded here at the Banff competition the year before.


Again, in this work, the scherzo (no minuet, here) is the second rather than the traditional third movement, but it is one of Mendelssohn's “fingerprints,” this fleet-footed (or rather fleet-fingered) wispy atmosphere evoking the fairies of “A Midsummer Night's Dream.”

Mendelssohn takes a selfie, 1837

The first movement opens with a theme that might remind you of the last movement of Mozart's G Minor Symphony. (Curiously, when the Mendelssohns traveled to London shortly after their Rhineland honeymoon, Felix, giving an organ recital at St. Paul's, met the organist there who, some fifty years earlier, had studied with Mozart in Vienna, so he wrote a few preludes and fugues for him.) But the figure pre-dates Mozart's 40th Symphony: known as the “Mannheim Rocket,” it's an upward-rushing arpeggio of a motive much used by the various composers associated with the court orchestra of Mannheim, just a few miles south of where Mendelssohn was writing his new Quartet. Perhaps he and Cecile had visited the palace there, where the orchestra performed in Mozart's day, and he decided to use this motif as a tribute to both Mannheim's past and to the Great Mozart?

The slow movement is one of those soulful “songs-without-words” he was so famous for, and the finale returns to the liveliness of the scherzo combined with the turbulent drama we'd left behind in the first movement.

As much as Mendelssohn is considered a Romantic composer – the 19th Century, after all, is the century of Romanticism – and he has many of the emotional attributes of the style, his sense of formal clarity, clean lines, and a general sense of proportion speak to the classical side of his creative muse. He may have been influenced by the Late Beethoven Quartets but he rarely ventured into their rarefied world. He is much closer in style to Mozart and Haydn, and his love of counterpoint is clear from his early study of the then little-known music of Bach.

When Mendelssohn met Berlioz in Rome – he was writing his “Italian” Symphony, Berlioz his “Fantastique” – he wrote home how, after examining his new friend's score, he felt the need to go wash his hands. Though he championed Berlioz' music as a conductor, he had little sympathy with the extreme Romantic style. Had he not died in 1847 at the age of 38, one wonders what he would have made of the later music of his contemporaries, Wagner and Liszt, or even the as yet undiscovered Brahms who would show up on Robert Schumann's doorstep only a few years later.

Here's a link to the post about the Bartók 5th Quartet on the program. You can hear two different performances, both by Hungarian quartets (including The Hungarian Quartet led by a long-time friend of Bartók's) and one of them with score. For the adventuresome reader, there's also a bit about "what makes Bartók sound so different?" Plus, since the scherzo of Bartok's quartet is based on Bulgarian dance rhythms, why not watch a video about some folks dancing to some authentic Bulgarian folk dances?

- Dick Strawser